Danticat and Her Other Works 1

Edwidge Danticat: Well, Breath, Eyes, Memory started with another kind of writing that I started doing in high school. I joined a newspaper called, "New Youth Connections" in New York City that was written by—and it's still published and distributed through high schools—and is written by high school students. When I started writing for them, I would, you know, I got a little bit more authentic in my writing. So I started writing about Haitian Christmas rituals: you know, sparklers, and having crema, which is sort of a coconut condensed milk drink like eggnog and going to church, things that our family did at Christmas time. And then started writing about that, wrote about things that were happening in my school and then, for my final piece for them, they asked me to write about my first day in the United States and I had to go back. I mean, there are things that I remember—the lights, of course, but—and then when I was looking back I thought, the most impressive thing to me that day, in retrospect, was the escalator. This was, like, this moving carpet. So I wrote about my first day. I wrote about that and other things that I experienced that day and then when I was done I thought, "Oh, there's sort of something else here," and I continued, but I didn't want to write it in my name. So, I created a character who was 12, whose name was Sophie, and I started writing about her time in the countryside with her grandmother and then her mother sends for her and so my first book, Breath, Eyes, Memory, started that way. I started writing about Sophie and wrote about her from the time I graduated high school, all through college and graduate school, until the book was published when I was 25.